Mercer’s annual Cost of Living Surveyfinds African, Asian, and European cities dominating the list of most expensive locations for expats working abroad:

Five of the top 10 cities in this year’s ranking are in Asia with Hong Kong (2) being the most expensive city thanks to its currency being pegged to the US dollar (which drove up the cost of expat accommodations locally). Hong Kong was followed by Tokyo (3), Singapore (5), Seoul (6), and Shanghai (8). Ms. Constantin-Métral, the Principal at Mercer with responsibility for compiling the survey ranking, commented:

“The strengthening of the Japanese yen along with the high costs of expatriate consumer goods and a dynamic housing market pushed Japanese cities up in the ranking. However, the majority of Chinese cities fell in the ranking due to the weakening of the Chinese yuan against the US dollar.”

Meanwhile, Mumbai (57) was India’s most expensive city – climbing twenty-five places in the ranking due to its rapid economic growth, inflation on the goods and services basket and a stable currency against the US Dollar. This most populous city in India is followed by New Delhi (99) and Chennai (135) which rose in the ranking by thirty-one and twenty-three spots, respectively. Bengaluru (166) and Kolkata (184) were the least expensive Indian cities, but they still climbed in the ranking as well.

Elsewhere in Asia, Bangkok (67) rose seven places from last year while Jakarta (88) rose five places and Hanoi (100) rose six places.

Mercer’s annual Cost of Living Survey uses New York as the base city with all cities compared against it while currency movements are measured against the US dollar. The survey includes over 400 cities across five continents and measures the comparative cost of more than 200 items in each location, including housing, transportation, food, clothing, household goods and entertainment.

Bloomberg has reported that more and more, even experienced expat bankers are struggling to find and keep jobs in Hong Kong if they don’t speak Mandarin. The same goes for those without a mastery of China’s business culture or connections across the border.

One banking recruiter was quoted by Bloomberg saying that as recently as 2010, expatriates from Britain and the rest of Europe, plus those from the U.S. and Australia, landed 40% of his finance job placements. Today, that figure is just 15%.

At Citigroup, Chinese students will account for the majority of university graduates the firm intends to hire full time in Hong Kong next year while for the past two years, JPMorgan Chase & Co. has hired more than 40% of its full-time graduates and interns for operations in the city from local universities (a number the bank expects to increase as it ramps up business in the region).

Meanwhile, private banks are looking for China-skilled staff in order to capture a slice of the country’s burgeoning wealth. For example: Bank of Singapore Ltd, a unit of Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp, has hired 20 Mandarin-speaking relationship managers in Hong Kong this year.

Most global banks have also tried to bring in Chinese power brokers and many of these professionals are not only bilingual, they are bicultural as they are products of elite Western universities and can move seamlessly between China and the global Wall Street. These power brokers also bring deep connections to China’s leadership and state-owned enterprises.

Nevertheless, divisional and regional leadership roles in Hong Kong tend to still be held mostly by expatriates. But with a new generation of Chinese professionals emerging with language skills, top degrees and good connections now filling the lower ranks, it’s only a matter of time before they start replacing expats in senior leadership roles.

The South China Morning Post has profiled China’s “rent a foreigner” industry as it’s not uncommon for Chinese companies to hire foreigners, especially white Westerners, to represent them in public relations-type roles. Many Chinese equate Caucasian faces with business success and a global outlook while products made in China, but associated with foreign elements (such as a Western-sounding name or endorsed by a Caucasian model) have been seen as superior.

This perception has made China a lucrative place for foreigners to pick up work on the basis of their appearance and regardless of their skills with companies hiring foreigners for roles such as musicians, athletes, architects, lawyers and many other professionals for their marketing activities.

The “rent a foreigner” practice was explored in Dream Empire, a 73-minute documentary by Denmark-based American director David Borenstein that follows a young rural migrant, Yana, who sets up a foreigner rental agency in Chongqing to help her clients market their products and project an international image.

However, some expatriate professionals who have lived in China for many years resent the practice with one expat (who has been in the country for two decades) being quoted as saying:

“For me, and most other expats who are serious businesspeople in China, these people are an annoying irritant. They damage the reputation of expats in general, and make it harder for me to generate trust and credibility when I’m meeting potential clients and partners. It’s an industry built on a platform of dishonesty and deceit.”

The Asian Nikkei Review has noted a recent PwC study of CEO succession among the world’s 2,500 largest publicly traded companies and has found that China and Japan pick new CEOs with very different profiles.

Approximately 14.9% or 372 companies chose a new CEO in 2016 through normal succession, dismissals or mergers. The rate of change at the top of Japanese and Chinese companies, at 15.5% and 15.2%, respectively, was close to the global average; but what differed substantially was in the profile of Chinese versus Japanese CEOs as illustrated in the graphics below:

One of the few similarities between the profiles of new CEOs at Japanese and Chinese companies? The apparent aversion to picking foreigners as all of the CEOs of Chinese companies surveyed were Chinese and the same was true of the Japanese concerns.

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The Asian Nikkei Review has noted a recent survey by Gallup conducted globally from 2014 through 2016 which found that workers in East Asia are much less engaged in their jobs than their counterparts in the rest of the world. The U.S. pollster had asked workers in a range of industries and jobs 12 questions (including: “Do you know what is expected of you at work?,” “In the last year, have you had opportunities to learn and grow?” etc), then categorized the employees as engaged, not engaged or actively disengaged. Survey results were the following:The article went on to note that in a recent Nikkei Asian Review interview, the chairman and CEO of Gallup had commented that disengaged workers “drive customers out” and even “try to get others miserable.”

As for China, the article quoted a GM of a Japanese human resources consultancy with Chinese clients as saying that Chinese people tend to distrust organizations and this tendency is due to history e.g. as dynasties change, so too do power structures and bureaucracies.

In addition, he said Chinese people tend to trust only those they are very close to. In order to gain Chinese employees’ trust and improve their engagement, he said “employers should clearly establish their company’s mission and vision so that they can emotionally appeal to their employees.”

The Asian Nikkei Review has noted one thing both Microsoft and Google have in common – they are both headed by Indian CEOs in their 40s:

Satya Nadella, the 49-year-old chief executive officer of Microsoft, is from Hyderabad in Southern India. He studied electrical engineering at university and moved to the U.S. in 1988. He earned a master’s degree in computer science and management in the U.S. and joined Microsoft in 1992. After successfully leading Microsoft’s cloud business, he became the company’s third CEO in 2014.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s 44-year-old CEO, is the son of an electrical engineer in the southern Indian city of Chennai. He set foot in the U.S. as a scholarship student at Stanford University in 1993. After working for McKinsey & Co., he joined Google in 2004. He led the development of Chrome, now the world’s most widely used internet browser. He reached the top job in 2015.

Silicon Valley is a multiethnic society where nearly 40% of the 3 million or so people who live there are foreign-born. Although Indians trail behind Mexicans and Chinese by sheer number, the former are by far the dominant group among startup founders and employees of IT companies in the area. The article went on to point out:

Their increasing presence at the top of the American IT industry owes to a rich pool of talent at home with the ability to think logically — nurtured through India’s strength in math and science educations — and English language skills.

In a speech two years ago, addressed to 18,000 Indian expatriates filling a stadium in Silicon Valley, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he considers them as more of a “brain deposit” than a brain drain, as some in India make them out to be. As those people eventually return home, he said, they will contribute to the development of India.

The South China Morning Post has reported that in a female expat satisfaction survey by expatriate networking website InterNations, Hong Kong has become significantly less popular (falling from 12th to 29th place in the rankings) with expat women in the past year because in part due to grueling work hours.

Hong Kong ranked a dismal 53rd out of 191 countries or jurisdictions in the work-life balance category, with only 5% of expat women saying they were completely satisfied in this area, compared with an average of 17% worldwide. Hong Kong does have the longest working hours in the world, with employees typically clocking more than 50 hours per week (according to a 2016 survey by Swiss investment bank UBS).

Another negative factor was the city’s high cost of living, with 72% of expat women polled suggesting Hong Kong was too expensive. However, one American expat who owns a global public relations business and who lives in Sai Kung with her family, said the survey results did not reflect her own positive experience of living in Hong Kong. She commented:

“I love Hong Kong. If you’re happy to live in some of the more traditional ‘gritty’ neighbourhoods, and really experience the local flavour of eating in casual restaurants, it’s not so expensive. But many expats won’t live that lifestyle.”

Nevertheless, a spokeswoman for InterNations told the SCMP that most expat women surveyed in Hong Kong are increasingly unhappy with their lifestyle. Meanwhile, the president of the American Women’s Association in Hong Kong said the survey results were “not a surprise;” but she thought they could be partly explained by increasing numbers of “trailing [expat] spouses” who face financial pressure to find employment too.

However, the SCMP also noted that the InterNations survey findings contrast with a HSBC bank survey of 10,000 expat women last year. That survey found that expat women considered Hong Kong to be the best place in the world to advance their careers.

According to the South China Morning Post, some expats say that rising living costs, a move towards hiring locals and new visa rules in particular are making life on the mainland harder for foreigners. For example: There has been an increasingly negative attitude from the Chinese government towards expats and foreign workers with the string of visa changes over the past few years (along with government posters earlier this year warning locals against falling in love with strangers from overseas).

With the latest working-visa change that came into force this month for foreigners in selected provinces and will see expats given an A, B or C rating depending on work experience, language abilities and education, one expat (who has been in China for nine years) observed:

“As a foreigner who has been here for a long time and is quite well-established, these changes tend to have much less impact. By being well established here, one is accustomed to the Chinese ways and better able to be malleable and find a way around the changes, legal or otherwise.”

A China-Britain Business Council director was also quoted as saying that the visa moves were about clamping down on low-skilled employment and making sure foreigners coming to the country could make a contribution: “They’re just part of a natural process that China’s going through of concentrating – perhaps more explicitly than before – on attracting high-quality international talent in relevant industries.”

Finally, another expat who had first come to China 18 years ago, observed:

“Back in 1997 it was like the Wild West. It was like that bar in Star Wars – everyone was a freak of some sort. You had such extreme characters. Everyone there was either looking for something or running from something, or had a damn good reason for being in Beijing in those days. Now there are hordes of young foreigners getting off the plane every day.”

He added that since the economy had slowed, companies were not throwing “silly money at China and hoping it comes right later” as “they were blinded and seduced by the size of the economy… I think now it’s a lot more rational.” Nevertheless, he is still seeing plenty of young foreigners turning up as excited as he was as a fresh university graduate back in 1997 when he first arrived in China.

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The South China Morning Post has reported that Hong Kong’s overall ranking in the Expat Insider survey, published by expatriate networking website InterNations, fell further than all but two of 66 other countries this year – from 26th to 44th place. The new ranking marks a dramatic drop for the city from 10th place just two years ago while Taiwan, a new entry in the survey last year, topped the poll.

Hong Kong ranked a dismal 59th for work/life balance. This was largely dictated by its lengthy working hours (the average expat works 48.5 hours per week). By comparison, Taiwan earned fifth place for the same factor. But Hong Kong did achieve a respectable 24th place for overall job satisfaction as it’s a city where most expats have relocated to for new career ­opportunities.

In addition and since last year, the survey found that Hong Kong:

Fell from 24th to 42nd place in the survey’s Personal Finance Index section.

Fell from 37th to 48th in terms of how expats viewed the friendliness of the local population.

Five out of six expats in Hong Kong continue to feel that the language barrier here causes them –problems (compared with less than one in two expats living abroad worldwide). Nevertheless, almost seven out of 10 expats said they could get by without ­knowing Cantonese.

Meanwhile, the spokesman for the Taiwanese in Hong Kong group said he thought the popularity of Taiwan among expats probably reflected that many of those surveyed were well-paid professionals enjoying a good quality of life in a country where the cost of living is lower than Hong Kong:

“Taiwan is usually friendly to expats – they are a rare animal. The people in this survey are probably high-ranking officials in various fields; their lives will be brilliant. Taiwan has a very low crime rate, the food is great, the coffee shops are everywhere, and the health care system is good.”

The spokesman added that he would likely move home to Taiwan – if it offered him the same career ­opportunities as Hong Kong.

About a decade ago there was a large focus on the banking and legal industries amongst the international community, however as the Asia economies continue to surge ahead it has brought a range of fantastic new business opportunities in various industries; startup cultures to SMEs to broader business scenes. Now its common to see professionals (or ex professionals) working in startups, running businesses in retail, technology, food and beverage, the arts, other creative industries or non-profits as well as capital markets and legal.

When asked what type of industry or business is more conducive to success in Hong Kong, she commented:

Any type of business can be successful in Hong Kong whether trading in the city, basing corporate headquarters or launching into other parts of Asia, if you get the approach right. The city lives and breathes a “can-do” attitude and energy, and its infrastructure really supports ease of doing business. Creative industries such as the arts, wine and food as well as non-profits and have also flourished in recent years.

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